Rainmeter 2.1 Out Now

Rainmeter, the highly customisable, open source, free resource monitor suite for Windows, has released its latest version, 2.1. It's been over seven months since the last full release and the big changes are evident of this.

The Main New Features:

New NowPlaying Plugin - Previously in Rainmeter you would need a different Rainmeter 'skin' to control each of your media players, this was due to the coding. While you can still use these individual per-media player skins, the new NowPlaying skin is coded to function with a broad range of media players with the change of just one setting - AIMP, Foobar2000, iTunes, MediaMonkey, MusicBee, Winamp, VLC Media Player, Windows Media Player, Last.fm, Media Player Classic, OpenPandora, Spotify, TTPlayer and Zune.

Rainmeter Manager - This combines the previous bundled apps (RainBrowser, RainThemes, RainBackup, Rainstaller) into one. This also features a much more intuitive tabbed GUI.

Performance - Rainmeter never used much in the way of system resources, now it uses even less! The improved performance helps with providing a significantly faster launch time and image caching for graphic heavy skins. Some performance tweaks are only relevant to Windows 7, such as the addition of Aero Blur Support and some new network usage tracking bits and pieces.

Development Features - Various new scripts are available to devs, meaning they can create even more awesome skins.

One particularly useful feature in 2.1 is that all skins designed to work with previous versions of Rainmeter e.g. 2.0, are fully functional with 2.1.